ON THE DANGER OF THE HURLEY POLICY

July 12, 1945

[This comment was written for the Hsinhua News Agency.]

It has become increasingly obvious that the policy of the United States towards China as represented by its ambassador Patrick J. Hurley is creating a civil war crisis in China. Sticking to its reactionary policies, the Kuomintang government has lived on civil war ever since it was set up eighteen years ago; only at the time of the Sian Incident in 1936 and of the Japanese invasion south of the Great Wall in 1937 was it forced to abandon its nation-wide civil war for a time. Since 1939, however, civil war on a local scale has again been waged without interruption. "Fight the Communists first" is the mobilization slogan used by the Kuomintang government among its own people, while it relegates resistance to Japan to a secondary place. At present all its military dispositions are focused not on resisting the Japanese aggressors but on "recovering lost territory" from China's Liberated Areas and on wiping out the Chinese Communist Party. This situation must be taken into serious account in our struggle both for victory in the War of Resistance and for peaceful construction after the war. The late President Roosevelt did take it into account and consequently, in the interests of the United States, refrained from adopting a policy of helping the Kuomintang to undertake armed attacks on the Chinese Communist Party. When Hurley visited Yenan as Roosevelt's personal representative in November 1944, he expressed agreement with the Chinese Communist Party's plan for the abolition of the Kuomintang one-party dictatorship and the establishment of a democratic coalition government. But later he changed his tune and went back on what he had said in Yenan. This change was crudely revealed in his statement in Washington on April 2. In the interim, according to the selfsame Hurley, the Kuomintang government represented by Chiang Kai-shek seems to have turned into the Beauty and the Chinese Communist Party into the Beast, and he flatly declared that the United States would co-operate with Chiang Kai-shek only and not with the Chinese Communist Party. This, of course, is not just Hurley's personal view but that of a whole group of people in the U.S. government. It is a wrong and dangerous view. At this juncture Roosevelt died, and Hurley returned to the U.S. embassy in Chungking in high spirits. The danger of the China policy of the United States as represented by Hurley is that it is encouraging the Kuomintang government to be still more reactionary and aggravating the civil war crisis. If the Hurley policy continues, the U.S. government will fail irretrievably into the deep stinking cesspool of Chinese reaction; it will put itself in the position of antagonizing the hundreds of millions of awakened and awakening Chinese people and will become a hindrance to the War of Resistance in the present and to world peace in the future. Isn't it clear that this would be the inevitable result? A section of U.S. public opinion is worried about the China policy of the Hurley type with its dangers and wants it changed, because as far as China's future is concerned, it sees clearly that the forces of the Chinese people which demand independence, freedom and unity are irresistible and are bound to burst forth and supplant foreign and feudal oppression. We cannot yet say whether or when the U.S. policy will be changed. But one thing is certain. If the Hurley policy of aiding and abetting the reactionary forces in China and antagonizing the Chinese people with their immense numbers continues unchanged, it will place a crushing burden on the government and people of the United States and plunge them into endless trouble. This point must be brought home to the people of the United States.